interpreters, not its creators. The race is dumb without its artists;
but the artists would be impossible without the sustaining fellowship
of the race. In the making of the "Iliad" and the "Odyssey" the Greek
race was in full partnership with Homer. The ideas which form the
summits of human achievement are sustained by immense masses of earth;
the higher they rise the vaster their bases. The richer and wider the
race life, the freer and deeper the play of that vital logic which
produces the formative ideas.




Chapter XII.

The Imagination.


The Lady of Shalott, sitting in her tower, looked into her magic
mirror and saw the whole world go by,--monk, maiden, priest, knight,
lady, and king. In the mirror of the imagination not only the world of
to-day but the entire movement of human life moves before the eye as
the throngs of living men move on the streets. For the imagination is
the real magician, of whose marvels all simulated magic is but a
clumsy and mechanical imitation. It is the real power, of which all
material powers are very inadequate symbols. Rarely taken into account
by teachers, largely ignored by educational systems and philosophies,
it is the divinest of all the powers which men are able to put forth,
because it is the creative power. It uses thought, but, in a way, it
is greater than thought, because it builds out of thought that which
thought alone is powerless to construct. It is, indeed, the essential